A Slow Education in People

A Slow Education in People

Notes from a massage table, somewhere in a year of becoming harder to surprise.

The room smells faintly of eucalyptus and something I cannot place. Sandalwood, maybe. The memory of sandalwood.

The therapist asks if the pressure is okay, and I say yes before she has even begun, which is something that I am used to doing. Agreeing before I understand what I am agreeing to. Saying yes to the temperature of a room I just walked into. Saying yes to plans I have not thought through.

She starts at the base of my neck.

Oh.

I do not know what I was expecting, but it was not this. The pressure she finds is pressure I brought with me, carried in like luggage and set down without even remembering I had been holding it.

She moves into the soft spot beneath my skull and a ridiculous thought arrives uninvited.

I have been carrying entire people up here.

There was a man I trusted last summer. He’s in my left shoulder.

There was a friend who made me question my own memory of a Sunday in March. We had gone for breakfast and she arrived forty minutes late, changed the story halfway through telling it, then later insisted she had never said the first version at all. I remember because there was apricot jam on the table and because I spent the entire drive home wondering why she felt the need to lie like that. She lives somewhere between my left shoulder and my neck.

There is a version of myself from a decade ago who believed everyone meant what they said.

She’s everywhere.

“Are you breathing?” the therapist asks softly.

I had forgotten.

I lower my face back into the cradle and try to breathe like a person who is at peace, which is a difficult thing to do when one is naked under a sheet and being asked by one’s own body to confront several years of misplaced faith.

The therapist asks if she can use more pressure on my shoulder and I tell her yes.

This time I mean it.

There is a knot beneath my right scapula that she works out patiently, pressing into it with her thumbs, waiting for it to surrender. The knot is an old visitor. It comes every few months, regardless of how often I stretch or how expensive the ergonomic chair was supposed to be.

I think about who I was the last time my body did not hold it. It was only a few months ago, but I cannot seem to remember her.

You see, what I have been learning, slowly and against my will, is that most people are not pathological liars because they’re inherently evil. It’s because of something smaller, sadder. They lie because they cannot afford the truth. They are embarrassed or scared, and lie because saying the real thing would require becoming someone ugly.

I believed that if I stayed patient, soft, or generous enough, I could draw honesty out of people the way a nurse draws blood, quickly and kindly with a little bit of pressure.

I no longer waste my time.

She presses into a muscle along my spine and I make a noise I will not describe in writing.

At some point over the past few years, I stopped expecting people to be more honest than they were comfortable being. I’m still working out whether that comes from wisdom or exhaustion.

The little things do not surprise me the way they used to. The colleague who agrees enthusiastically during a meeting and then tells the entire office afterwards how much they hated the idea and the person. Or the woman who says she is happy for you while smiling mechanically. The friend who is always more than willing to receive, believe, and distribute bad news about you and the list is endless. I notice these things in silence now, no need or willingness to discuss them.

She moves to my lower back and I think I may actually cry, which is not a thing I had planned to do today.

The realization about people came one betrayal or disappointment at a time and usually while I was doing ordinary things like drying my hair or walking through the supermarket.

Interestingly, seeing people more clearly quieted me.

Everything used to be so personal. A delayed text. A cancelled plan. Very obvious hateful comments. Someone choosing a different brunch. Why would you lie to me? Did I do something to make you feel unsafe?

I am tender with that version of myself now.

She moves to my calves and I am startled by how much they hurt. I had not considered them. What kind of thing lives in a calf? I cannot account for this. These are muscles that have held me upright through entire conversations I did not want to have. So, of course, they hurt.

“You hold a lot in your legs,” she says.

I do not reply.

I started thinking about forgiveness and what it meant back when I was younger. It meant letting someone in again and pretending nothing had happened or that it had happened less than it did. I forgave people the way you get out of bed in the morning, thoughtless, automatic, without examining what I was putting back into the cupboard.

I do not forgive that way anymore.

I think the cynic decides people are bad and stops trying, but a discerning person should keep looking and stop being surprised.

So, what I have now is closer to release. I let people be what they are and I let the thing they did stand as a piece of information about them. I do not require them to apologize or understand or even know I was hurt. I do not require myself to keep them.

I used to imagine getting to this point as a kind of soft golden warmth that absorbed everything. But it feels more like a clear pane of glass that you can see through. You can stand on either side of it and it is still glass. It is still by all indications, a line.

She works at something tender in my foot and I think about how long I spent assuming generosity meant making myself easy to reach and love meant having no edges.

The women I admire now all have edges. They have warmth too. Both, at the same time. They give what they want to give and they do not explain what they decide to keep.

I am slowly learning to be one of them. Some days I am better at warmth and other days I’m all edges. I am rarely good at both.

That is, I think, the work.

The pressure has shifted and she’s doing something to the soles of my feet that makes no anatomical sense and yet seems to be releasing something in my chest. I have given up trying to understand the body.

I think about how a year ago I would have already pulled out my phone and tried to trap this feeling immediately. Save it before it disappeared, like smoke in the dark.

She ended the massage by pulling and stretching each of my fingers. I hadn’t even realized I was clenching my fist. She asked if I felt more relaxed and, when I said I did, left quietly.

I stay like that for another minute. The room is dim and my breathing sounds different from the one I arrived with. Slower.

I sit up eventually and realize the robe is too big. There is a pot of tea on the side table. Outside, the city is doing its own thing.

I stand there for a second before leaving.

There is less weight now.